How ludicrous is this? Apple is a top performing company with plenty of room to grow. In the mobile space it is normal to count sales in the hundreds of millions. In computing you are big at 30 million units. Contrast with Nokia. At its peak, the Finnish company sold around 450 million phones a year. Mobile represents scale beyond the dreams of computer makers.

Apple is in a fairly new place with sentiment - performing extremely well but getting nailed by opinion. It's not entirely new. Apple competitor Nokia lost its shine before it lost its competitiveness, taking criticism for its design shortcomings while it was a global powerhouse.

Nokia was poor enough at managing perceptions about its performance that senior management lost the right to manage. And that view is forming around Tim Cook, rightly or wrongly.

“....automated sentiment analysis is viable commercially ONLY because of high frequency trading applications. Algorithmic trading is an anomaly in that it creates a feedback loop – it almost doesn’t matter about the accuracy of the signal, as long as there is a definite pos or neg signal the signal drives the trades, the trades drive further moves in the same direction in terms of investor sentiment and the value lies in latency, who can act first to exploit the opportunity creates, so that’s why sentiment analysis is a market at all.”

In other words Apple's problems lie in the signals swirling around the market place, all quite detached from its PR machine that largely emerge from social media sources like blogs. We need to know more about the impact of online sentiments. They are clearly taking a toll on Apple right now. Just as clearly we have a misplaced emphasis on social media as a marketing tool when in fact its real impact might be on valuations.

The right way to deal with it - Cook has to up his game and become more of a peer in the community of people building their businesses around Apple.